All grants, regardless of whether a block grant or a competitive grant, have a few components in common:

• Grants almost always involve require a specific project or action to be executed and the project needs to be thoroughly documented and reviewed.
• Grants require very detailed budgets and have very strict rules about how funding can be spent. Some grants, like EC funding and Title I funding are very broad in what funding can be used for, but funding must be used to serve targeted populations.
• All grants involve compliance monitoring, reporting, data collection, and demonstration that the funds have been used to support the project and improve the outcomes specified in the project plan.

Beyond that skeleton, each grant is going to be different in a variety of ways. Some grants will be open RFPs that anyone may respond to (or anyone who matches a certain audience, like a school or a teacher) whereas other grants may be “invited” where a grantmaker asks you to submit a proposal. Some grants will allow you to charge indirect costs to the grant as a percentage of the budget (for example, the University will take 52.5% of all funding from a grant for indirect costs by default, but some grantmakers only allow 10% which in that case is all the University can take) whereas other grants do not allow any indirect costs to be charged. Some grants require matching funds where an organization needs to put up some of their own money to match some percentage of the grant as a show of good faith and cooperation. Some grants may be used to fund personnel costs, and others cannot. Some grants may require letters of support and letters of commitment from your Board or partners to ensure that they will fulfill the terms of the grant.

Since failure to comply with a grant carries a fiscal obligation, and because matching funds may be involved, a local Board of Education may be required to be the official signatory of a grant application. Some grants, like Donors Choose, require a commitment from the district, and may require vetting of the products to be purchased by a CTO. Typically non-compliance on a grant or plagiarism of a grant application will require payback of grant funds and may bar the individual or organizations from receiving future grants from an organization or grantmaker.

Grants are commonly available from foundations, non-profits, and government agencies. GetEdFunding keeps a good database of small grants and the Department of Education keeps a database of all grants they make available to schools. All new grants across all government agencies are always published in the Federal Register. In North Carolina, this list is a reasonably good list of local grantmakers.

Writing a grant looks a lot like the process that we’ve been through in this course, from defining a vision, to identifying the content and devices, to the professional development, to creating a budget. Most grants typically will have an extensive literature base, expert review or advisory, and a detailed budget paired with measurable outcomes. A logic model and conceptual framework will also go a long way. American Journal Experts has a good how-to guide for writing a grant proposal. Grants typically have a very specific application format, from page margins and fonts to sections to table formatting. Failure to follow these guidelines exactly will usually result in immediate rejection of a grant (see this sample of a successful grant application). Professional grantwriters are experienced in finding and writing grants, and typically are paid on a commission for successful grants. However, while time-consuming and very detailed, anyone can write and submit a successful grant. The landscape for grants is often very competitive, however, and a majority of grants are not funded. While this is disappointing, rejected grants often come with extremely detailed feedback that will help you revise and resubmit your grant to increase your chances of receiving the grant in a future submission.

Sustainability

One of the greatest challenges with grants is sustaining the project after the grant ends. Many schools get in to trouble by using grant funding to make large purchases of computers and then can’t afford to refresh the devices after the grant has ended. Or a school will use grant funding to hire personnel that have to be reassigned or terminated at the conclusion of the grant. In these cases, a grant can actually be a huge detriment to a school because a large and successful initiative disappears after a grant. Successful grant applications will consider sustaining a project after the conclusion of the grant and will include sustainability in the grant application.